book heaven

In a Powerbooks warehouse sale we went to last year, we overheard a little girl squeal at the sight of piles upon piles of cheap and lovely books, “This is heaven!”

My heaven will have a lot of books too. I've always loved books. My love for reading started with my Readers' Digests that were lying all around the house . (I have a lot of booklover friends who started out on Funny comics. It's inexplicable.) I moved on to Nancy Drew, Sweet Dreams, Sweet Valley, Judy Blume. Now I read everything I can get my hands on (except that I don't pretend to like profound or complicated intellectual stuff). I remember when I was pregnant I devoured all the childbirth books I could find (not just What to Expect When You're Expecting) bcoz it was the one way I could think of (well, books and our Lamaze classes, that is) to arm myself in what was previously uncharted territory for me.

An ideal afternoon for me is lying on the hammock with a good book, say, the latest from Neil Gaiman, or some easy reading chick lit from Jennifer Weiner or Sophie Kinsella, something from Oprah's Book Club, Harry Potter all over again, or some obscure thing I bought all bcoz it happened to have a nice cover. I love to try out new authors too and derive great pleasure out of seeing my favorite books that nobody else seems to have heard of suddenly turned into big-budget Hollywood films. Last year, there was Reese Witherspoon's Just Like Heaven, which was adapted from If Only It Were True which my sis and I read and loved from way back. Recently I heard that Richard Gere is doing The Bee Season, this heartbreaking novel I read last summer. It's the same satisfaction I felt in high school when I borrowed stuff like Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace and Of Mice and Men from the library and my friends started looking at me like I was a weirdo, until our literature teacher gave us our reading list which included the books I've been reading all along. It's like vindication, like my tastes aren't so bad after all, and that maybe I have some culture in me after all.

I'm loyal to my favorite authors so I have shelves upon shelves of books by the same people (Anita Shreve, Anne Tyler, Roald Dahl, Robert Fulghum, Maeve Bincy, Larry Mc Murtry, who would later co-write the Brokeback screenplay). I could spend my entire salary on books, I swear. There's just something about the smell and feel of a new book. And you can always go back to your favorite parts if you feel like crying or cracking up one more time, or you can just read the entire book over and over again. And yet the thing about books is, you don't even have to own them, you can just borrow a fellow bookworm's and the stories can stay with you just the same. It's not like a favorite pair of jeans that you have to own and wear to show off. With a book, you can read it once and bring it with you in your mind and in your heart and re-tell the story to whoever's willing to listen anytime and anywhere.

My great recent reads include a memoir from Claire Fordham, which offers a unique peek into the life of her famous sister Julia from the point of view of an older and crazier sib. I've also just finished another memoir, an amazing one by a girl who was a victim of Munchausen by proxy, this unbelievably awful thing that a parent can do to a child. Over Holy Week I finished The Lovely Bones, as narrated by a dead girl who was raped and murdered by a serial rapist/killer in the neighborhood. It was written by Alice Sebold, who I learned was herself raped while a freshman in college.

I'm looking for a bookmark I once had. It had a great quote from some great philosopher like Demosthenes or something. It says something like, if I have money I buy books, and if there is any left over I buy food and clothes.